Browsing: Feature

     A Virginia judge has ordered a 10 day halt to Governor Ralph Northam’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee statue on Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue. Northam announced on June 4 that the monument would come down, after days of heated protests rocked the city. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and is often at the epicenter of heated national debates about the war’s losing side.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Florida and the Disability Rights Florida filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of individuals being held in dangerous conditions in Broward County Jail that threaten to speed the spread of the coronavirus among prisoners and staff. The lawsuit demands that the Sheriff’s Office immediately release medically vulnerable prisoners to home confinement or under other conditions so that their already heightened odds of contracting the virus and falling deathly ill are not exacerbated.

 The Supervisor of Election, as defined by Florida statutes, is the custodian of all election documents and records, from voter registration to candidate filings and election results. So, you can imagine my surprise when a senior election office official acknowledged that while they maintain custody of the Microsoft SQL Server database where all votes are recorded, no one in the office can log into the database or query its data.

     Allow me to be the one to tell you a secret, to share something with you that most of these men in here won’t even allow themselves to say out loud, where men in prison began to understand the reality of what the Corona virus was, the dynamics and method by which it unleashed death and the circumstances that accelerated the speed at which it could spread.

In a CNN interview, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar attributed the high coronavirus death rate to unhealthy African Americans. Azar claimed that Black and minority communities have higher comorbidities like underlying health issue.  “Unfortunately, the American population is very diverse,” Azar stated.

        As protests over policing continue to convulse cities throughout the U.S., one symbol keeps showing up: a Black-and-white American flag with one blue stripe.

Snapshot from ‘Justice for George Floyd’ protests. (Top left) Sheriff Tony Gregory kneels with local protestors in honor of slained Minnesota man, George Floyd

     The report by Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Allecia Wilson concluded Floyd likely died at the scene. Baden formerly worked as New York City’s chief medical examiner and conducted the autopsy of Eric Garner, a Black man who was put in a fatal chokehold by police in 2014.

     The arrest comes as protests take place in many places around the nation, including in Los Angeles, where a crowd of pedestrians blocked the busy 101 Freeway, and in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed. “Chauvin (who, along with four other officers, was fired after the incident) was taken into custody,” Minneapolis Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said in a news release.

While the most of the country protests the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, protesters in Tallahassee were fueled by its own police killings. Three deadly police shootings since March 20 were at the center of a large protest in Tallahassee on Saturday. Coupled with that fact that they occurred under the watch of new police chief Lawrence Revell, who was installed in December, protest leaders formed the march to express concerns over what they began to see as a pattern.